Germany as model and monster : allusions in English fiction, 1830s - 1930s

By examining the works of George Eliot, Carlyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Meredith, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as several post-World War II novels, Argyle explores the Goethean ideal of Bildung and the Bildungsroman (self-culture and the apprenticeship novel), Heinrich Heine's anti-philistinism, music, the Tübingen higher criticism, Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's philosophies, Prussianism, and avant-garde culture in the Weimar Republic. To establish the status of these allusions in the public conversation, Argyle moves between literary and extra-literary contexts, including biographical material about the authors as well as information from contemporary literary works, periodical articles, and other documentation that indicates the understanding authors could assume from their readers. Her methodology combines theories of allusion and intertextuality with reception theory. Bildung and the Bildungsroman The Bildungsroman retailored: Carlyle and Goethe The Bildungsroman assimilated: Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Ernest Maltravers and Alice The Bildungsroman as foil: George Meredith's The ordeal of Richard Feverel and The adventures of Harry Richmond The "Philistines' nets": George Eliot's Middlemarch Regeneration in German keys: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda Infidel novels Pessimism and its "overcoming": Schopenhauer and Nietzsche Prussianized Germany and the second Weimar Germany.